Rebrickable. Data Exploration

Rebrickable has been so kind as to provide us with data on their inventories and all related attributes (available here). So we decided to take some time to practice our visualization skills on real data (as well as maybe find interesting patterns in the data)

History of Rebrickable with your own eyes

Rebrickable is a company, therefore we would expect it to grow with time (assuming it is successful). But does the data confirm this? Even though we don’t have numbers on the revenue of this company :(, we can at least see how many sets were put out with time:

(plot is interactive, so feel free to inspect the data at your leisure)

As we can see, the growth in the number of released sets has been almost exponential through the years. (One possibility, however, is that many of the new sets each year are just “updated” versions of older sets - and the possibility of “update”s accumulate with years)
Up until about 1980 the median number of parts in sets has been quite volatile, but after that has been predominantly in the range of (20, 40]

Rebrickable doesn’t see color

Of course, sets are built out of parts. Luckily, Rebrickable divides parts into neat categories according to their use. And we wanted to check whether resources are being unnecessarily spent on diversifying colors.

Unfortunately, we see that the distribution is quite logical:

  • Parts which are more likely to be on the outer surface - have larger varieties of color (e.g. Minifig Accessories, Bricks, …)
  • Parts which are more likely to be on the inside or parts of mechanisms - have smaller varietes of color (e.g. Pneumatics, Mechanical, …)

Top 10 Hot Themes in Your Area!! <3

Millions of people around the world build sets specifically because of the theme (perhaps their favorite show or movie). So we decided to see which themes have been most abundant in the inventories of Rebrickable and when did they first appear!

Theme Avg_Num_Parts Year_Introduced
FIRST LEGO League 490.269663 2000
Educational and Dacta 396.098214 1985
Star Wars 261.933875 1999
Super Mario 185.085714 2020
9V 157.840000 1991
Bionicle 61.377012 2001
Mixels 41.289256 2014
WeDo 26.675676 2008
DC Super Heroes 7.789474 2020
Series 19 Minifigures 6.350000 2019

(The table was introduced due to plotly not cooperating well with the plot above)